Monday, December 1, 2014

Riffing On Some Weird Fiction Titles...

How about a few Weird Fiction titles that have left an
impression on yours truly, circa 2014?This is not comprehensive, though I expect to do reviews and/or little blurbs as part of my writing repertoire...again. Again, though I cannot let it take over! I used to write music reviews, dear god, gods, and all in charge of distracting the writer, and lost track of my own writing, so...they'll come when they come, but I am consciously making an effort. Not just forWeird Fiction as I'll get into Horror and all its motley
relations--dark fiction in general--but I’ve been threatening to do this one for awhile, so now
that I’ve completed my novel, Riding The Centipede, I can take a deep breath,
read more, write outside of the parameters of that beast, and…let’s get to
it.

I’m
going to ramble a bit as I’ve wanted to say something about Scott Nicolay’s
astonishing debut collection ever since I finished reading it.No, wait…it was probably around the time I
finished reading “The Soft Frogs” I knew I had to say something.So I wrote notes, a mess of them, fragments,
observations.Let’s see if I can make
sense of them.

Shall
we?

I
remember reading the first story “alligators” a few years back, enjoyed the
details, yet thought the ending was rushed.I knew I wanted more, though, to follow Nicolay’s growth as a writer,
because he had something here that compelled, despite my misgivings about the
ending.

Growth
was fully attained with the release of his debut collection, Ana Kai
Tangata.Though, to be honest and in
retrospect, it was all there in “alligators,” intentions and presentation
clearly defined.I simply had to
acclimate to what Nicolay was doing as a writer.

That
said I skipped it, wanting to experience something else, something new.

The
eight mostly long tales in Ana Kai Tangata posit a densely woven exploration of
the exterior and interior landscapes to create a concise, hyper-realistic
picture.Layer upon layer, a CT scan
delineated with words.In every story,
the psychological terrain is not only expressed by the motivation of
characters, the terrain they are immersed in is paramount to the whole picture,
bleeding into the character’s mindsets…or vice versa.There’s deep knowledge and understanding of
Weird fiction, but the tales are firmly set in the here and now, utterly
distinct and uncompromising.Nicolay has
vision and sets forth with unwavering determination to convey this vision to
the utmost of his immense talent.

He
succeeds on every count.

I
didn’t even read the title story.I
watched it as it played out on the cranial cinema in my head.I may never have visualized a story as
lucidly as this one, caver Max’s fumbling breakdown something to behold, the
final image annihilating any pretext to hope.As with many tales here, the casual asides are an essential part of the
story architecture.Offhand comments,
many of them of a sexual nature, are also essential to each story’s
psychological foundation.

The
only other tale I’d read by Nicolay before diving into AKT was “Eyes Exchange
Bank,” from the Shirley Jackson award winning The Grimscribe’s Puppets
anthology.I could see again Nicolay was
doing what he did in “alligators” until a paragraph toward the end ("Ray
opened his mouth to reply, but his tongue had gone numb…”) stopped me dead in
my tracks.Nicolay had somehow touched
perfection, an astonishing feat, a dense, beautiful depiction of dread, a kind
of psychological (again, everything here touches on multiple layers with the
perceptive reader) erosion manifested in an incapacitating way, a split second
in one’s personal Hell.I re-read the
paragraph a few times before moving forward, absorbing what he had done.
Fascinated…

This
is something he does.The compulsion is
to re-read the tales because they so deeply cut into something inexplicable and
beyond my understanding.But I want
more.Nicolay is addictive.

“Phragmites,”perhaps the most detailed story and threaded with Navajo nuances throughout—more than threaded, it's woven into the text—punches once, then once again, a brutal, harsh finale.

“The
Soft Frogs” (probably my favorite story) sinks into the shallows of Jaycee, a
lost soul driven by punk rock and blow jobs and not a whole lot more.Connecting with a woman known as Eye at an
abandoned Convent patrolled by the title amphibians, it may sound like a
preposterous premise for a story, yet the details as always really flesh this
one out, and the soft frogs made me think of early 20th century
horror, as if they were born back then, but mutated into what they had become,
now.And, please, don’t take a look
under Eye’s shirt…

“Geschafte”
(probably my…favorite…story…) (ahem) is a masterful descent into urban dread, deeply
hallucinatory, a fever dream of erosion on every level (outward, inward...), ending with a shocking
image that feels like something culled from the finest of Japanese Horror.A curious thought? No matter, it’s brilliant. (I've just noticed I've used the word 'erosion' three times already. Interesting...and I'm not changing it.)

“Tuckahoe,”
a short novel, opens with an extra limb found at a car accident on the Parkway
south of Tuckahoe.This may “feel” like
the most traditional tale, yet it’s still prime Nicolay, veering all over the
place, from a realistic bout of rough sex, to a labyrinthine rural nightmare,
to a finale that is about as cruelly horrific as any you might encounter…though
at this point, we’ve encountered many worthy contenders among these pages.

Perhaps
the best way for the reader to acclimate to Nicolay’s mad scientist masterplan
is with “The Bad Outer Space,” in which a precautious [edit: I meant precocious, excuse me] five year-old experiences
a spin on weirdness that is of a level of expression that is crystal clear.Simplified, if not simple. And so different from anything expected.But, again, that’s where all the tales go.

I
noticed as I read the stories, I gathered a deeper understanding of what
Nicolay was doing—not attempting, but doing—and my enjoyment of the stories as
I read them grew exponentially.After
the final story, I went back and read the first story, “alligators,” and the
ending was perfect, the final image and build-up before it, powerful.

I
had learned well…

I
could go on.There’s a lot to embrace
with these stories.A lot to learn (hey,
I know nothing about caving, but since a couple stories here touch on the
subject with genuine depth and knowledge, now I do).Read them all.Don’t just read a couple and think, well,
I’ll finish this later.These tales are
meant to be absorbed in large chunks over short time.Ana Kai Tangata is a fully immersive,
mind-altering masterpiece.Required
reading for anybody into Weird fiction...or anybody who wants to experience words as well as read
them.Mandatory...and, as noted at the
beginning of my ramble, fairly astonishing.PS. Forgot to mention, David Verba's artwork is spot-on for what Nicolay does with words. A perfect pairing.

***

Before
I move on: Dynatox Ministries.You need
to clip and save the link and make regular stops at the site.They specialize in limited edition chapbooks.The Dunhams Manor Press imprint deals with Weird Fiction.You
need these titles, but need to be timely.Here and gone asap…

Some examples...

***

Far From Streets--Michael Griffin

“We can’t spend our lives in between.”

Married couple Dane and Carolyn take the road less
travelled, losing track of life and, with Griffin’s measured, precise
presentation, the sway of Time, splitting the seams that connect modern
convenience with personal happiness and even sanity.Dane’s quest for a simpler life wrought in the
bones and atavistic at heart disintegrates for both of them into a harrowing
nightmare of decay and malaise, all within a house in the woods, and the
surrounding mysteries of a forest as much a character in the tale as Dane and
Carolyn.Psychological devastation has
never been as subtle...

Michael Griffin’s Far From Streets is a 21st
century modern classic of the Weird, a tale I’m sure would meet with Algernon
Blackwood’s approval.Griffin is putting
together a collection as I type this.I
cannot wait to read it!

***

Weird Tales of a Bangalorean--Jayaprakash Satyamurthy

A sense of being caught in between, in a limbo land of
subtle dreads mounting a slow demise via attrition of self and soul, resonates
powerfully in Satyamurthy’s haunted tales full of decay and filth, embroidered
with the culture of India and religious/spiritual subtexts.We start nowhere, we end nowhere, but it’s
not the same nowhere.There is a
singular mood that dominates the collection, a shroud cover that almost
suffocates, not unlike the work of Simon Strantzes. Excellent!

***

Christopher Slatsky—No One is Sleeping in This World.

A brief tale about the influence of architecture, of “sacred
geometry,” perhaps...or is it the schizophrenic have found their god?The city as sentient being?Strangely captivating.More, please. An inspiring tale, triggering a lot of deep thought from yours truly.

***

The following title is not from Dunhams Manor Press, but deserves your attention.

Bartlett spins the dial to a radio jacked into the psyche, where
the nightmare world unravels and a surreal dream-logic pushes the tales along with real intent in this curious and most satisfying collection that seems at all times to be spilling off the edge of the page. That's the dream-logic in motion and often taking over; at times, what happens seems to have come to Bartlett right then, at the moment he types whatever mad words are to follow. Some tales come off as bruised snapshots suggesting something more, but the collection as a whole resonates with a distinct tone that connects them all.Fascinating and…self-published?Some smart publisher needs to sign Bartlett
up Now.He knows what he’s doing and I
Want More.

***

There’s more Dunhams Manor titles for me to catch up on (T.
E. Grau’s The Lost Aklo Stories, Joseph S. Pulver’s Fatally-Coloured Gestures
[excuse me for this, but Pulver deserves a special mention here: if you want to
read a masterful meshing of Noir and Weird, by all means, pick up his novel,
The Orphan Palace; you may know his short work—and should—but that novel is
something special], and a few more), as well as some Horror titles, too. I started
Kate Jonez’ Ceremony of Flies and was immediately hooked, so looking to get
back into that, as well as a couple of releases by one of my fave writers, Lucy
Taylor (Fatal Journeys and A Respite for the Dead), S.P. Miskowski’s finale for
the Skillute Cycle, In The Light, and many, many more.

(We all speak of our TBR piles. Who are we kidding. There's no catching up. It grows, we dip in, we make strides, it grows more. Never catching up...)